The debian equivalent of this technique works reliably - often a binary package from the next release up will depend on later versions of core packages like libc than are standard in the current release. Upgrading libc for this one package has the knock-on effect of upgrading a large amount of the distribution. But the source of the package is not incapable of building against the current libc, it's just that the precompiled binary wasn't build against it. Which means that we can do